This file provides information for replicating the results from: Jonathan Kastellec. 2011. "Panel Composition and Voting on the U.S. Courts of Appeals Over Time" Political Research Quarterly


Data
There are separate datasets for the panel composition analysis and the panel voting analysis. Note that I used several Stata do-files to manipulate the original Songer database; the updated databases appear below. If you're interested in seeing the actual steps that led to this updated data, please email me for more information.

Composition data:
	-- Songer data: "songer_caselevel_1925_2002_for_mixed_panels.dta"
	-- Sunstein data: "sunstein_case_level.dta"
		-- Codebook for Sunstein Data: "sunstein_codebook.xls"

Voting data
	-- Songer data, case level: "songer_caselevel_1925_2002_vote_data.dta"
	-- Songer data, judge level: "songer_judgelevel_1925_2002_vote_data.dta"

Weighting data. 
For both analyses, this file of weights is necessary to adjust for the stratified sample selection in the Songer database: "songer_weight_data.dta"


For convenience, the following two files give information about the partisan breakdown of the Court of Appeals across time, both at overall level and broken by circuit. Neither is necessary to run the scripts below, however:
	-- Overall: "percentage_of_dems_appeals_overall_1925_2004.csv"
	-- Circuit: "partisan_composition_by_circuit_1892_2007.csv
	-- More detailed information is also available in this dataset, which is created in the 1st script listed below: "partisan.composition.csv"

Scripts
All the analyses were performed using R. There are separate scripts for the composition and voting analyses.
 -- Panel composition: "panel_composition_rates_script.R"
 -- Panel voting rates: "panel_votes_script.R"

In addition, this script is necessary to create the shading in the graphs: "dem_control_shading.R"
